George Stubbs

George Stubbs was born on 25 August 1724 in Liverpool, England, the son of a currier and leather dresser, John Stubbs, and his wife Mary. He worked in his father's trade as a teenager before seeking training as a painter. Around 1739 to 1741 he entered a brief, informal engagement with the Lancashire painter and engraver Hamlet Winstanley, gaining access to the art collection at Knowsley Hall, but the arrangement ended after a dispute and lasted only a matter of weeks. Beyond that episode, Stubbs was self-taught.

Around 1744 he moved to York to pursue anatomical study, and from 1745 to 1753 he worked as a portrait painter while studying and teaching human anatomy under the surgeon Charles Atkinson at York County Hospital, where he dissected cadavers. This period produced his illustrations for John Burton's midwifery textbook, published in 1751. In 1754 he made a short visit to Italy, returning convinced that the best course for an artist was to paint directly from nature rather than follow academic models.

From 1756 he rented a farmhouse in Lincolnshire and spent roughly eighteen months dissecting horses, suspending carcasses and drawing them layer by layer to record musculature and skeletal structure. This research became the basis of The Anatomy of the Horse, published in 1766, still cited as an authoritative anatomical reference. The precision it gave his painting attracted major aristocratic patrons through the 1760s, including the commission for Whistlejacket, now in the National Gallery, London. In the 1780s Stubbs also worked in enamel on ceramic plaques produced by Josiah Wedgwood, exhibiting five such works, including a self-portrait, at the Royal Academy in 1782.

Stubbs died on 10 July 1806, at the age of 81, at his home at No. 24 Somerset Street, near Portman Square, in Marylebone, central London.

Modern institutional attention to Stubbs has centered on major loan exhibitions rather than a continuous market presence, a pattern typical of long-deceased Old Masters. The Frick Collection's 2007 exhibition described him as renowned for treating animals with a precision and dignity ordinarily reserved for the human figure, the product of years spent documenting the anatomy of horses, dogs, and wild animals. The Walters Art Museum's 2007 survey, the first exhibition in two decades built specifically around Stubbs, foregrounded the horse as the organizing theme of his art. Later shows at the Fitzwilliam Museum in 2019 to 2020 and the National Gallery in 2026 have continued to present him as a painter whose scientific observation, not decorative convention, is the source of his authority, a reading that has been consistent across two centuries of curatorial writing.

Stubbs's auction record is Gimcrack on Newmarket Heath, with a Trainer, a Jockey and a Stable-lad, which sold at Christie's London on 6 July 2011 for GBP 22,441,250, about USD 36.1 million, then a new auction record for the artist. It surpassed the previous high of about GBP 10.1 million set by Brood Mares and Foals at Sotheby's London in 2010, reflecting a market with limited but consistently sought-after supply, since many of his most important paintings already reside in national museum collections.

There is no confirmed catalogue raisonne currently in print for Stubbs, and authentication rests on museum scholarship, provenance history, and comparison to well-documented institutional holdings rather than a certifying foundation or estate. Because so much of his major output sits permanently in museums such as the National Gallery, Tate Britain, and the Yale Center for British Art, the works that do appear at auction are genuinely scarce, which supports strong prices but also means each sale is an individual event rather than part of a dense, comparable trading history. Collectors should weigh provenance and exhibition history closely, and treat any single auction result, including the 2011 record, as informative rather than as a stable trend line.